Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday September 12, 2010 @06:57AM
from the little-machine-little-price dept.

indogiree writes "Engadget reports that India has just awarded the manufacturing contract to HCL Technologies. The first shipment will supposedly only contain the 7-inch model and is set to arrive on January 10. It's unclear if the $35 price has stuck or whether India's been successful in plans to drive the price down to $10 eventually with the help of large orders and government subsidies. HCL Technologies plans to initially produce 100,000 units. Among the key features of this India-based tablet include 2GB of RAM, web-conferencing, PDF reader, unzip, WiFi, camera and USB connectivity."

Because, as Apple shows, people are not necessarily going for the cheapest thing.Also you're shooting yourself with low profit margins - look at Motorola and Nokia nowadays - they were selling decent phones a while ago and decided to go for the low hanging fruit of cheap phones. That didn't leave enough focus/resources on the smartphones.The result is the're both still in big trouble, with Motorola resuscitated by Google's Android as compared to cash rich Apple, who clearly have a strategy that brings in more money and focuses on innovation much more...

Anything can be made not only "affordable", but even "free" with sufficient amount of subsidies.

It's not honest to advertise subsidized prices as the true expense. Someone is paying the subsidies, although it might not be the student or his school. Yet especially in India, they want to express nationalistic pride for this achievement, while comparing subsidized price with unsubsidized free-market prices. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that this device is fair amount more expensive in total cost than the tablets Chinese manufacturers have been pushing out now for a while. For instance, one can find "Android tablet PCs" from AliExpress for tad over $60. I wouldn't buy one, but I highly suspect that the Indians would have beaten the Chinese in costs...

Of course they use the cheapest technology, when they want to produce the cheapest product. The point they want to make is that the consumer doesn't necessarily want to pay the extra money to get the extra expensive parts when they are not necessary for the functionality. You don't need the glossy shiny polished glass surface to check the bus timetable on your smartphone, for example.

The normal definition is a memory with flat access times - i.e. it doesn't matter what part of the memory you access, you can do it equally quickly. This doesn't apply for things like tapes or HDDs, which are respectively either sequential or semi-sequential (sequential per cylinder) access.

In the case of flash the time to perform a write is strongly dependent on the preexisting erase state of the block - if it's cleared already, it's much faster than if you need to clear it. That means that the time to access a given block of memory isn't constant (or even nearly so) so it's not really random-access.

(If you want to be really nit-picky, it's random access on reads but not on writes. It can even end up being more complicated since you can have a read queued behind a erase on some flash devices)

Those Indian friends of yours seem to be the typical armchair experts who enjoy giving opinions over a glass of beer. It really isn't that easy.

Why don't you try it? It's an open challenge. Once this product is released, I want to see you smuggle a dozen of these tablets to the USA - just a dozen. I will reimburse the costs of all 12 tablets if you manage to do it.